Read Online Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Irwin Shaw
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outside the doors were like the last personal effects of people who had been executed that afternoon at cocktail time.
He passed twenty doors. There was not a sound coming from behind any of them. The guests, locked in, safe with their unchanging names and undivided lives, slept secretly, not divulging their positions. There were no red shoes before any of the twenty doors. He made sure of that.
He forgot the number of his room and for a moment stood stupidly in the middle of the hushed corridor, overcome with the feeling that he would never find it again. Look for the room with a bloodstained jacket hanging in the wardrobe. No, he remembered, the old lady is cleaning it. Per pulire, per favore, Dottore.
Then he had a brilliant idea. He looked at his key. There was a big plastic tag to which the key was attached and on the tag there was a number. 654. He was favorably impressed with his wisdom and the cold and logical precision of his thinking processes. He traveled cleverly down the corridor, avoiding both walls, and stopped in front of 654. He had the feeling that he had never been there before, but that he had been at another door, marked with the same number, and that significant transactions had taken place there. Night clerks, making their nighttime errors. Where had the other door been? In what city? New York, Los Angeles, London? There was the smell of laurel and eucalyptus, tropic and medicinal, about 654. Beverly Hills, he remembered, Delaney’s town. Delaney’s punishment, with the fog coming in from the Pacific, and a girl in a convertible late at night and a dog in the back seat that kept barking, the bared, carnivorous, California fangs of love.
He put the key into the lock and went into the room, bachelor-like, without children, that he was sure he had never visited before, smelling the eucalyptus and the laurel. The glass on the etchings of Rome reflected the light from the glass chandelier coldly, cutting medieval Rome into chaotic fragments, rhomboid battlements, polygonal towers, unrecognizable to the dead men who had built it.
He went into the bathroom and stared at his face, first over one basin, then over the other. One for me and one for whoever. He almost recognized himself, like the ghost watchers coming out of theatres year after year, and his name was on the tip of his tongue. I bet it’s him, he said, in a girl’s voice.
He went into the bedroom and looked at the picture of his wife and his son and his daughter. The picture had been taken in the Alps, on a skiing holiday, and a whole family was smiling there in the mountain sunshine, the sunny claims of memory. The helicopter was down, in a swirl of snow, on the ledge at three thousand meters, with the dead men in it, in polite attitudes, waiting to be photographed. He sat on the bed and looked at the telephone and thought of himself picking the instrument up and saying, “I will take the midnight plane, or the dawn plane, or the unscheduled plane.” But he didn’t touch the telephone.
He undressed, hanging his clothes up carefully (the liars who advertised valises that did not crease three suits). He lay naked in the darkness between the sheets, saying to himself, Morning, morning.
He thought of the red shoes and the red German hands, handling lire and flesh. Then he slept.
4
T HE BULL ROARS IN his pen, but the president, in a black mask, and wearing a Berber headdress, comes into the ring and declares the bull unsuitable. The crowd attempts to pour gasoline over him. It is imperative, for a reason that is not clear, to get the bull out of his pen without permitting him to enter the arena. Two attendants, dressed in white, goad a white cow, theoretically in heat, into the passageway, lit by a glass chandelier, before the entrance to the bull’s pen. The cow is frightened and makes difficulties and wedges herself across the passageway. The white-clothed attendants struggle with the white cow to straighten her out and present her
He passed twenty doors. There was not a sound coming from behind any of them. The guests, locked in, safe with their unchanging names and undivided lives, slept secretly, not divulging their positions. There were no red shoes before any of the twenty doors. He made sure of that.
He forgot the number of his room and for a moment stood stupidly in the middle of the hushed corridor, overcome with the feeling that he would never find it again. Look for the room with a bloodstained jacket hanging in the wardrobe. No, he remembered, the old lady is cleaning it. Per pulire, per favore, Dottore.
Then he had a brilliant idea. He looked at his key. There was a big plastic tag to which the key was attached and on the tag there was a number. 654. He was favorably impressed with his wisdom and the cold and logical precision of his thinking processes. He traveled cleverly down the corridor, avoiding both walls, and stopped in front of 654. He had the feeling that he had never been there before, but that he had been at another door, marked with the same number, and that significant transactions had taken place there. Night clerks, making their nighttime errors. Where had the other door been? In what city? New York, Los Angeles, London? There was the smell of laurel and eucalyptus, tropic and medicinal, about 654. Beverly Hills, he remembered, Delaney’s town. Delaney’s punishment, with the fog coming in from the Pacific, and a girl in a convertible late at night and a dog in the back seat that kept barking, the bared, carnivorous, California fangs of love.
He put the key into the lock and went into the room, bachelor-like, without children, that he was sure he had never visited before, smelling the eucalyptus and the laurel. The glass on the etchings of Rome reflected the light from the glass chandelier coldly, cutting medieval Rome into chaotic fragments, rhomboid battlements, polygonal towers, unrecognizable to the dead men who had built it.
He went into the bathroom and stared at his face, first over one basin, then over the other. One for me and one for whoever. He almost recognized himself, like the ghost watchers coming out of theatres year after year, and his name was on the tip of his tongue. I bet it’s him, he said, in a girl’s voice.
He went into the bedroom and looked at the picture of his wife and his son and his daughter. The picture had been taken in the Alps, on a skiing holiday, and a whole family was smiling there in the mountain sunshine, the sunny claims of memory. The helicopter was down, in a swirl of snow, on the ledge at three thousand meters, with the dead men in it, in polite attitudes, waiting to be photographed. He sat on the bed and looked at the telephone and thought of himself picking the instrument up and saying, “I will take the midnight plane, or the dawn plane, or the unscheduled plane.” But he didn’t touch the telephone.
He undressed, hanging his clothes up carefully (the liars who advertised valises that did not crease three suits). He lay naked in the darkness between the sheets, saying to himself, Morning, morning.
He thought of the red shoes and the red German hands, handling lire and flesh. Then he slept.
4
T HE BULL ROARS IN his pen, but the president, in a black mask, and wearing a Berber headdress, comes into the ring and declares the bull unsuitable. The crowd attempts to pour gasoline over him. It is imperative, for a reason that is not clear, to get the bull out of his pen without permitting him to enter the arena. Two attendants, dressed in white, goad a white cow, theoretically in heat, into the passageway, lit by a glass chandelier, before the entrance to the bull’s pen. The cow is frightened and makes difficulties and wedges herself across the passageway. The white-clothed attendants struggle with the white cow to straighten her out and present her
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